saucetenuto

This is true but I don't think it meaningfully checks the president, because the pardon power is also absolute and unreviewable, and does cover courts martial (as we saw in the Eddie Gallagher case). Military personnel are not required to follow illegal orders from the president, but if they do they won't face legal sanction.

thank you, friend

Guess again! Roberts explicitly calls out orders to the military as covered by absolute immunity. EDIT: and motive is explicitly barred from review too.

> ...all of these server applications would have to be easy-as-an-iphone to set up and administer. Right now, such apps don't exist, because there's no market for them. But if the market were there, millions of people with hosted servers just sitting around, you can imagine how quickly they'd get made.

I don't know about this. People have phones and computers, too, but we still have gmail instead of personal mail servers, and we still have reddit instead of usenet. As a developer I definitely prefer serving web pages to shipping iphone apps (never mind physical CDs) because the deployment and maintenance stories are so much simpler. In other words, even if millions of personal servers existed already, why would a developer prefer to write Self-Hosted!Instagram instead of just Instagram?

> we like them and we prefer to be friends with them.

How true is this? Every Finnish person I've ever met has mistrusted and feared Russia.

Right, but then you also shouldn't be using the techniques described in the article, right? To put it another way, there's no case where deferred collection with smart pointers is better than real GC.

I have the same problem as the GP, on four monitors. All four, bought at different times in different countries, are miscalibrated according to these calibration images. Is that plausible? If not, what might be going on?

And if it _is_ plausible that four random monitors are all miscalibrated in the same way, why should we optimize for well-calibrated monitors?

Suppose I have a configured tab width of 2 and I write a line with three tabs that's 78 characters wide. When my friend with tab-width 8 views it, he'll see a line that's 90 characters wide. What do projects with 80 character limits do in situations like that?

In either case the line contains only 75 characters, of course, but that's a pretty pedantic non-answer: we care about horizontal screen space, not the number of bytes of storage you'd need.

I guess I saw his proposal as more about customer acquisition; those of us who already know and love the game can send Tarn $19 any time we want, right here: http://www.bay12games.com/support.html

I think this analysis assumes that Dwarf Fortress has reached only a small fraction of its total addressable market (that is, the space of players who can enjoy DF without large improvements to new player onboarding). Any fixed-price offering risks cannibalizing Patreon subscriptions, whose expected LTV is probably _much greater_ than $19.

Their chosen tradeoff makes more sense if you think of it as "subscriptions versus one-offs" instead of "sales versus donations".

I think this is my favorite Underhanded C submission ever. One simple ambiguity, applied with breathtaking precision and effectiveness. Puts me in mind of an old essay of Zed's: http://zedshaw.com/archive/the-master-the-expert-the-program...

So they get all the business they want from word of mouth and referrals? Good for them, but doesn't that imply that there's a lot of unmet demand?

How about: "Reliable curation"

Do you have a source for this? According to opensecrets.org, they're in the top 2 for tech companies (their major rival is Comcast), but they spend much less than Blue Cross/Blue Shield or the National Association of Realtors. This has been true since at least 2010 (as far back as I checked).

They do sometimes spend more than Boeing, which I wouldn't have guessed.

That famous Platforms rant was supposed to be Google-internal, right? Implication: he's still writing, but you have to be a Google employee to read it.

Google really does have the best benefit program in tech.

EDIT: I'm kinda joking, and kinda not. Maybe it seems silly, but this really will be on my mind next time I hear from a Google recruiter.

I think he means that YC literally has not helped: they haven't made things any worse, but neither have they tried to make things better.

Ah, I see, I just misunderstood their interface. Thanks.

Where should I go to understand your work if I hate watching videos but like reading? Is the wiki the best resource?

Sure. As I said, I don't think skepticism is _correct_ here. But a critical reader will always be asking themselves, "why did they write it that particular way?", so as an author you have to continually ask yourself the same question.

I think there's a useful lesson here about precision in writing. _Why_ the Fog Creek developers left isn't central to the essay's main point, and it's not interesting in itself. But the author did include it, so clearly he thought it was relevant somehow, but why? One salient hypothesis, in this context, is definitely "they left because of Wasabi".

Well, I don't think they actually did leave because of Wasabi; the chain of reasoning I described above isn't very sound. But it's easy and obvious, and the author could have avoided it by doing a little less.

Part of the point, I think, is that there isn't a single correct answer. The answer the Nameless One chooses is the answer which is capable of changing him.

Wouldn't you have the same problem with a minifier, then? Minified js isn't "preferred" for anything except parse time.

Yes it has! It conquered our soda industry and then gave up.

It's fine if your world is designed this way, but in that case you shouldn't be allowed to play as a fighter. Do it like Magicka, say, and offer your players their choice of wizards.

I don't agree. The _signature_ should indicate whether a function has access to a class's internals or not, but the caller shouldn't have to care. This is already true in C++ today: when we write f(x), f might be a normal free function or it might be a friend of x.

Viewed from that angle, this proposal makes C++ more consistent, not less: it breaks a needless dependency between syntax and semantics.

I see what you mean but I do think the STL was more visionary, and more abject, than almost anything else in its reference class. Truly unified sequence operations, for example, were novel back then. On the other hand, binary search _wasn't_; I'd love to know what that guy thought he was doing.

Lambdas in C++ are pretty new. Most of us who used std::algorithm had to write our own functor structs and do the variable capture by hand. Except that typically we didn't, because at that point a for loop is more readable. I think that's the essential objection to the STL: it's a library built around functional programming and not OO, in a language built around OO and not functional programming.

And of course there are a bunch of small dumb things in it. Why do we have make_heap() and friends instead of a heap type? Why does binary_search() return a bool instead of an iterator? Why didn't we get any hash tables until like 2010? Who thought the vector<bool> specialization was a good idea, and why didn't they benchmark it first?

The STL is a weird mix of brilliant, visionary API design and abject failure. Because of C++'s many limitations, the fail-y parts are the parts that most people are most familiar with. C++11 has done an incredible amount to turn that around, but at this point, for me, it's too late: I'd rather have a new language and new library, informed by C++'s successes without being bound to its mistakes.

The PHP runtime does know the types of all values at all times, though, in a way that the C++ runtime, insofar as it can be said to have one, does not. To call that type _safety_ is a little much even by the standards of dynamic languages, because PHP is so willing to do implicit type coercion, but _at runtime_ a PHP program is certainly more able to detect type errors than a C++ program.

You're right, of course. This is the sort of thing that Eisenhower foresaw when he warned against the military-industrial complex, but even with the benefit of hindsight I don't know what we could have done about it. Everyone's incentives are aligned, and in the wrong direction.

Well, ultimately they're trying to help out Boeing and other major contractors, right? It's not about big government versus private industry, it's about private industry defended by lobbying and pork-barrel concessions versus private industry that doesn't have those things.

Not that that's better.